Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By : Sunil Mundra
Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By: Sunil Mundra

Overview of this book

The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Enterprise Agility
About Packt
Forewords
Endorsements
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Significance


Our minds, for several centuries, have been used to a much slower pace of change. Our brains have been wired to favor predictability, certainty, and risk aversion. However, the basic properties of complexity are unpredictability and uncertainty. We have a hindsight bias which makes us believe that things are predictable, even when they are not.

According to Peter Green, who led a grassroots Agile transformation at Adobe from 2005 to 2015:

"Hindsight bias leads us to treat complex work as predictable. Instead of using empirical processes based on transparency and frequent inspection and adaptation loops, we do extensive up-front planning and implement stricter controls to meet the original plan. Years of "lessons learned" sessions caused us to move further and further from the right approach." [i]

Until very recently, and perhaps even today, our formal education was largely oriented towards a linear way of thinking, tight cause-effect relationships, frowning on ambiguity, rewarding...